GDC 2010: Please Finish Your Game

This makes me want to watch the “you are all stunted adolescents” rant. Is it available anywhere?

I feel like a bit of a prick spamming my stuff all over the place, but I feel semi-qualified to speak on this.

I keep talking about how long it took to make “drone” because I’m amazed I managed to work on one thing for so long, an amount of time that isn’t very common in the freeware market.

I’m also one of those assholes that correlates development time to quality.

But from my limited experience I can safely say that spending a lot of time on one project is a waste unless you are going to sell it.

“don’t shit your pants” is always going to beat you ;)

Well, it’s not always about winning…

Chris makes some valid and fair points here. Great rant.

It’s a fair point and a fairly obvious point as far as it goes, but what bugged me about this when I first saw it is the lack of regard for the differing motivations we all have for making games and the idea that an abstract thing like a game mechanic is somehow *deserving* of anything at all.

There’s also the fact that most jam games *would not exist at all* but for the time frame and freedom of being able to cut the cord and get away with it. These aren’t so much baby games that don’t see their full potential as *bonus* games that are lucky to exist at all, and we’re lucky that people with day jobs and ‘main’ projects take the time to share their experiments with us.

I also think he missed the point of why we mention dev times for short shit, but cactus covered that in the emails before the bit where I stopped reading.

But yeah, it’s a ‘rant’, and you’ve got to present bold statements for that sort of thing or it’s not interesting. And he did say please.

However, fuck that see-saw.

I tink cactus’s contribution is undeniable, regardless of the perceived value of each individual game. The fact that there are so many stands as a monumental proof to something the industry has long considered game development an arduous process only to be accomplished by highly experienced craftsmen with professional tools and large budgets.

I agree with some points and disagree. A game that had a long development time and fully explored a ‘mechanic’ is deserving of praise, naturally.

But, what did he mean by wacky ideas or shallow games?

There has been the great debate over games as art. In my opinion, they are, since a game is someones creation and visualization. However, like art, what seems to be happening is that the indie scene is starting to suffer from “art school critiquing”. That’s my own term and I’ll happily explain it:

I went to art school for a total of 6 years. 6 years of my life wasted. I was trained to be an “artist”. It was only after that I realized, one can be trained to be a technical artist (proper drawing, painting, color theory), but one CAN’T be trained as an artist.

In art school, one of the practices in the classes was critiquing by peers. So we would look at each other’s art at the end of the class and pick it apart. Praising what looked nice and being critical of message or meaning. At the end of it, many students would change their creation – tweak it. Now it was no longer their own creation, it was a mix of suggestions and other peoples ideas with their own.

You cannot critique someones creation, unless you could physically be inside their head, experience and imagine the same thing – then compare the physical output to what they mentally conceived. So training to be an “artist” was a failure. An artist makes a creation that was an expression of themselves. It is meant for the viewer to come up with their own judgement, feeling and experience. If no one on Earth likes your art, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a crappy artist. It also doesn’t mean that you are not conveying a message – if any at all. Art is an extension of oneself and so that’s simply what you created. Others can take it or leave it.

Games are the same way. If Cactus makes a game in 2 hours… it’s a game. If it sucks or didn’t realize what “we” may see as potential or a mechanic.. that’s our personal opinion. We can take it or leave it. In my eyes, that would never make Cactus any less of a game designer that the creator of Braid. In 3 years Cactus can make hundreds of neat little games. Some may be fun, others may suck… none the less, that collection as a whole is impressive to me and a deep insight into his creative process. Braid on the other hand is a single game created over 3 years – I can’t see anything else about that creator’s creative process, however, I can see all the neat things he implemented in the design of the game, levels, story, mechanic, etc.

I’m sorry, but that scale does not tip either way. And if it could, I don’t think that we have the right to influence it. Each unto his own, but together as a whole. That is the spirit of indie – or what it should be. If the indie scene starts to be influenced in one direction or another, you’ll have a certain amount of people who will feel that they aren’t worthy of the title or you’ll have a bunch of people who criticize others based on what they do or don’t do. If that happens, then the spirit of indie is lost.

That does happen with a lot of areas of human creation. Classical animation for instance has a set of rules and protocols that make you a respected animator. Some of the best Flash animators are still looked down upon. Even lithography of all things has an elitism around it. I dropped out of just an elective class half way through it because I was so sick of all the tight rules regarding a final finished piece of work. I purposely spattered ink around the white edges on the prints of one of my works. “F” Art Professor: “You dirtied the work and broke the rules.” Me: “Rules!? You simply said to make a print, you didn’t specify any technical rules. I made a print of my artwork, the spatter is part of the creation. You’re an artist yourself… do you not get that!?” Art Professor: “The border on the print must stay clear. FAIL.” I did some erotic art prints… “D” Art Professor:”Erotic art is NOT ART, it’s Porn, that’s why you got a low mark. No one who does lithography makes erotic art.”

Right now as I’m still learning to program, I’m impatient for getting my games out there. I also want to publish some simple casual games on the iPhone as well. If I should be moderately successful, I’ll continue on to make larger, deeper, complex games. I have one project that could take even a seasoned programmer/game designer 2 years to make and test. But here’s the thing. I have 2 small simple ideas, that I’m literally just weeks away from being able to make. They are heavily inspired by a couple of very successful but simple casual games in the iPhone. Despite that the controls are very similar – the game content and level creation are more unique. Some could say, that both would be on the knife’s edge of being rip-offs or clones. Say I make them and sell them. Perhaps, doing so will give me a poor name from a good number of indie designers and gamers. Does that mean I’m branded for life? Currently I’m working on a game for the iPhone, that is also inspired by some iPhone hits, but not only is it unique enough, I’m putting a lot of work into artwork, humor and story. The engine is quite simple and can be made in 2 days, but because of the heavy content of artwork, the project will take months. It could take a year, but it is a labor of love. The hits that inspired my game had very short development times, because they were very basic and simple. But, they were hits, because the bottom-line for an iPhone game is fun. If it’s fun it will sell. If it’s just a 10 minute time waster – perhaps a lot in the indie community may not want to recognize it as worthy of the title of “indie game”, but it’s still a game and if it’s fun, it succeeded in what the creator of it wanted. Yes, some do just make games just to make some money, but the majority of those games aren’t fun and you can usually tell that the creator’s heart and soul wasn’t in to its creation.

Anyway, that’s my response rant… take it or leave it.

Eh, I disagree with Chris.

Prototypes and small games definitely have their place in gaming. Most people don’t want to devote a gargantuan amount of energy making a huge game and end up with few people enjoying it.

I say, keep on making small games and prototypes, and if any of them are particularly well received, make a sequel to push their ideas to their logical and aesthetic extent. This worked pretty well for Tower of Goo, Portal, and even non-games like 9.

Finishing a game soon.. put off coding to read Tigsource, and voila.

@Xeno: You didn’t watch the video, did you…

@ Skofo I don’t think Chris is saying prototypes or prototyping is a bad thing. Its a necessary process for quickly testing ideas. We all know that.

I think he wants us indies to take these prototype (especially the great ones) and flush them out further. Lets face it quite a few great ideas / prototypes will never reach their full potential because they were never “Finished” as Chris puts it.

It is the choice of the individual developers at the end of the day how far their want to take their idea but as a community we should be encouraging individuals to “finish” there game rather than just getting it done as quick as possible.

Indie gamers would not notice all indie developers that wasted 3 years on their best idea, even if those gamers played Braid.

Good games are not only good, they are also on a good place, in a good time.

Snow, I read your text and I’m glad I did. I can’t decide what side to take but thought of this quote:

“You cannot critique someones creation, unless you could physically be inside their head”

Does it depend on why a developer creates a game?

Many developers create games “for” players. If there are no players, the game is not “for”.

“You cannot critique someones creation, unless you could physically be inside their head”

This is kind of an insane comment to my mind.

Of course it’s wrong to assume that by looking at a piece of art you can understand, just by viewing it, everything that went into the work, the intentions of the artist and their state of mind while making it. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion on the work, in fact creating opinions and responses to art is, to me, the reason you make art.

Taking critique and using it to mold your work and improve it is the mark of a skilled artist, it takes maturity to realize the insights of others and incorporate that into your work. If your intention is to communicate, which I believe is the base intention of all art, then you need to be able to take others critiques on how your work may be failing to communicate.

It’s not wrong to splatter some paint on a page and call it art, it is art. But depending on what you are trying to achieve with your work you probably don’t have a good idea of how others will perceive your piece until they tell you. In the same manner, it’s not wrong to take the critiques of others and change your work to better achieve your intention.

It’s all in your own personal process, but my believe is that those who take critique and use it to “improve” their work are the better artists, and will become better at communicating their ideas through their work. Those who get angry or just blow off all critique fail to grow and continue to make work which is indecipherable to other people.

Oh, also I agree with Chris, but the problem is making small games is really fun. A game jam is a great weekend event, it gets you in an exciting new headspace and lets you just mess around with no consequence.

Taking a game to a “finished” state is super hard, takes a lot of time and careful thought, responding to a lot of critiques from others, and there are heavy consequences to creating a deep, complex gameplay system.

It’s just the hardest thing to do in game development.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

@Snow – I went to art school too, and it was largely a waste of time for me as well. Still, it sounds like your art school was pretty conservative… I can’t imagine our lecturers taking such a sniffy attitude.

As for the jamming… well, maybe indie devs do play fast and loose for the most part. I think that’s fine; a good thing even – as long as it leads to the occasional finished work along with all the experiments. Which of course it frequently does – World of Goo is an obvious example of this process at work. And if somebody like Cactus might leave some of their ideas under-developed, somebody else can always come along and pick up the ball.

I made a commitment to take a concept and see it through to its logical and aesthetic conclusion. And I ended up working on that one game for EIGHT YEARS. That’s not really very cool. I’ve missed out on exploring dozens of other ideas that I’ve had during that time. I’ve missed out on participating in the whole indie scene, really, since it all grew up during the time I continued to work on developing this one project.

Rapid prototyping is awesome. Game jamming is awesome. I want to do more of that, I really do. I think it’s one of the most healthy things you can do to nurture your creativity and skill. I think it’s important to bite the bullet and commit to a larger project sometimes too, but don’t go rushing in to these things. That labour of love can easily become a very long time on the treadmill.

Finishing a game is one of the hardest things you can do. It involves a lot of slog. It can be punishing on an artistic mind, which likes to procrastinate and flit about.

But I think the rewards, both mental and material, of releasing a game that pushes itself to a logical conclusion match the hardships.

Feels damn good. :)

Say what you will about Social Games but being able to launch and then iterate off of data is the dream and one that I’ve craved since I started making games in 2005. It’s better than being a mole, digging away and then being blinded by the sun.

I want to comment on this because I have been following the indie scene for quite a while and this rant (what both persons speaking said) mirrors my views about what I think are very important subjects. To start of I think we have to distinguish between what are the “objectives” of the creator and the user/player. While I partly agree with the position of “better release something with the core idea than nothing”, because that may be the objective from the creator’s point of view, thus seeing his creations as “complete” or having archived it’s purpose, from the end of the user I am many times “disappointed” (saddened may be more appropriate) to see that while the idea was good, it didn’t fulfill my objectives, and I’m not talking about being exactly the game I wanted, you could say the analogy goes more along culinary terms, to have a meal and be “full” or satisfied at the time. In that way I do feel as the game is “incomplete”.

I also feel I must comment on the subject of “don’t tell me how to do my art” because, with no personal disrespect intended, I think it’s illogical. Art at least could be summarized in expressing something you have inside that you want others to see (or hear, etc.) But to say that you don’t need anyone’s opinions, views or expectations because then it wouldn’t be “you art” is not true. Nobody is born a “master of it’s own art” we all learn how to express more properly what we want through getting ideas from others. If it wasn’t so, as a creator why visit webpages like this anyway? Because when you see other people’s creations you are going to be influenced… *even if you don’t want to!*

I think (and again please don’t take this as a personal offense, it happens to me too) when messages or critiques like the one in this rant pop up, we go into more of a self-defense posture, in reality saying “I won’t do it because you are telling me to”, because the truth is that everybody changes and improves based on an external criteria. We can try to ignore it or even go the opposite direction to keep away from it, but we are still influenced… the real strength comes when you take it and use it *your way*. And in the end, like people have already said in these comments, when we improve and mature, and work towards completing things we end up happier about what we create, and we realize it actually represents better what we wanted to express in the first place.

So I think Chris Hecker and Heather Chaplin are right, and kudos specially to Chris for being (in my opinion) so polite and tactful about saying it.

i’ve been working on a game for nearly 3 years now but disagree with him, for the reasons radix mentioned (people have different motivations and some people don’t have much time).

also, chris hecker has never finished a big indie game, correct me if i’m wrong? all he’s done is work on spore. what is it with this trend of people who have no experience giving talks and other people listening just cause they’re famous names.

@Mike I don’t fully agree with what you said, however I do appreciate your thoughts and insights. I say you’re right if it comes to the technical. For example, someone makes a flash game – but it runs slow and choppy, so you give that person advice on optimization or maybe just say, “don’t be lazy when you’re making your game, put a bit more effort into it.”

@Galaxy. Point taken. Being influenced by other people’s creations is a huge driving force. For instance my iPhone games ARE influenced by other creations. Art and self-expression are on a broad spectrum. Sometimes we do create for the viewer/participant and in return gain from their opinions and criticism. I think it just struck a chord with me by someone who makes a comment about whacky or shallow games. It’s derogatory unless it’s aimed at a particular group of games – justified and within reason. I appreciate a game that someone like say Noonat did in 48 hours for Ludum Dare. Like the (sorry noonat, but I forgot the name of it) alien invasion game he did. No, not technically excellent and pretty minimalistic, but damn, it was one of very few games out there that I felt tension in. The colors, atmosphere and sound did enough that I think that even within such a small time frame, he conveyed his vision quite well.

I will always be defensive when it comes to art, because it is solely up to the artist whether they want their work to be seen, judged and or criticized. So you’re right in that respect – as a game designer that posts their works online, want gamers to play their games and do benefit from feedback. In art school, I never had a choice for having my assignments critiqued.. and I hated it. I think if I hear the word “juxtaposition” mentioned one more time, I’ll go postal.

I don’t know how many people read these articles and comments. I’m nobody special myself, but I do hope that enough out there heed my warning. Video games are a completely new media/medium and were for a time closed off to the average person – in terms of development. The indie video game as a part of that medium and practice is fairly new compared to all other existing mediums out there, many of which have been around since ancient times. Don’t fall into the trap of stagnant rules and protocols. Keep it as open and free as possible. So always be wary of influences on the practice as a whole.

@ Paul Eres I completely agree. In this case, if it’s true that he’s only worked on Spore, then he’s no more qualified to give a talk than I am. It is said that you are an expert at something if you’ve done it for 10’000 hours. I’ve played, imagined, tested, read about and even started to creat video games. I was there on consoles, arcades from the 80′s, 90′s to the PC. I’ve seen it all and played so much, I guess that makes me an expert gamer of sorts. I’ll be starting to prepare my speech for GDC next year. See ya all there.

@Mike again,
Ok, I reread your post. I agree more actually. You have good points. I was on the defense. As I said to Galaxy, if one displays art or means it to be seen by others, then what you said:

“If your intention is to communicate, which I believe is the base intention of all art, then you need to be able to take others critiques on how your work may be failing to communicate.”

is applicable, but still only to a certain degree. IMO

I wonder what the implications are if you invest more than 10,000 hours on developing a single game…

i also wouldn’t say that 10,000 hours playing games translates to 10,000 hours of experience at game development…

@Paul not what I meant, but the experience can help. Plus, I was joking as I’m sure you were aware. :P But the 28 years is true. I’m lucky for that.. and old.

i’m 31, but so what? i’d still trust a 16 year old with four finished indie games to talk about the topic of finishing indie games more than this hecker guy, with his zero finished indie games… my point was just: why listen to people without experience talk about stuff they have no experience in?

regardless, i don’t think we should totally dismiss him: he does ignore differing motivations and lack of time (perhaps because he’s an industry insider), but there’s still a case to be made that most indie games are too unfinished and unpolished, and that simply sticking with a game for another 8 months instead of making a game a month would be a good choice for a lot of indie developers (and perhaps a bad choice for others).

Hi everybody, thanks for the thoughtful comments, both pro and con! A few notes:

I think littleMel#11 pretty much summed up my take on this perfectly. I’m not saying prototyping/jamming/compos are inherently bad, and yes, people have different reasons they make games, but I’m saying I fear people are erring too far on that side of the equation right now, and we need to make a correction. If we overcorrect towards going deep, that wouldn’t be so bad for a while. As littleMel says, it’d be great if the community would encourage people to go deeper on the really interesting prototypes they make. This isn’t just indie games, either, as I say in the video. The corporate game industry doesn’t go deep very often either.

I agree with mike#15 and Derek#18: finishing a game at all is hard, and capital-F Finishing one is insanely hard. I’ve only managed to ship one game in my whole career, and as I say in the video, I don’t think it was Finished. When I was indie for 8 years before going to maxis, I didn’t finish or Finish any games, even after years of working on them, but I had lots of cool prototypes. Hopefully I will Finish SpyParty. :) As cactus says in the thread on my page, it’s hard to know what mechanics are worth spending the extra time on. But, even given that difficulty, or perhaps because of it, I think it’s important that we do better at this.

paul eres, dude, what is with you? This is like the 3rd or 4th comment thread on various sites in which you’ve called me out “just because I’m famous”. I mean, I’m all for you arguing and disagreeing with the actual content of my rant, but following someone around the internet bitching about who is saying something instead of what they’re saying is just lame. At least in #27 you say people shouldn’t “totally dismiss him”. Gee, thanks!

Chris

Agreed – those of you who are making personal attacks are off base here. His work with the IGDA, Indie Game Jam, and finishing Spore all seems like evidence against your arguments for why he has no authority to be making these statements.

I think there are some good benefits to making small games, though. Every small game you finish teaches you something about the production and design process. Making several small games will improve your production craftsmanship more than one large one would. And you will learn about implementing different designs and creating different experiences through that process.

Maybe a good balance is to have a rhythm to game size. Make some small games, then make a larger game, and go back-and-forth.

No one will probably hear this because it’s just middle gray.

> Maybe a good balance is to have a rhythm to game size.

I like this idea. I’m not sure I agree with your statement above it that several small games will teach you more than one large one would, I think it’s more complicated and subtle than that, but I like the idea of having a personal rhythm (as long as it includes some long notes! :).

Chris

Hey Chris, I have to say that of all the comments here, Radix’s statements actually struck me the most, and I’m wondering if you can address this part especially:

“what bugged me about this when I first saw it is the lack of regard for the differing motivations we all have for making games and the idea that an abstract thing like a game mechanic is somehow deserving of anything at all.”

I personally think that it’s more important to respect what you, as the developer, are trying to achieve with your product. I am reminded of Cactus and Podunkian’s collaboration called “Dungeon”, which in Cactus’ own words was described as “An amusing experiment”, and by that he meant amusing to himself and other witnesses behind-the-curtain.

You warned about subtlety, so I assume you are aware of this point of view in the argument. So is your message more along the lines of “Don’t be afraid to take on something bigger”? Because if it is, then I think that’s a fair point, but I don’t get how saying “We don’t need more wacky idea” correlates with that at all, it seems only to muddle the message you are trying to get across. There is no “we”, there is only what the game developer decides, is there not? If Cactus decided that he wants to make a game just to please himself at others’ failed attempts to figure it out, and he achieves that goal, perhaps HE needs that. Maybe I don’t need that, or you don’t, but it’s fairly presumptuous to assume that there’s something we Should be doing with our games.

Maybe some goals are more respectable or socially acceptable, but I think we should call them for what they are. In assuming that you’re aware of all this, which could very well be true, then what is your message? “Reach out to as many people as you can with your games”?

Also, I realize now that you’re not the one that stated that games “deserve” anything or another, but your speech seemed to tie into that comfortably, but I’m definitely not pulling words out of your mouth, I’m just making an assumption based on what your speech communicated to me, and I felt like it was along the same lines as what she said.

I think to sum up that text wall I just posted, I’ll ask a much clearer question:

“What does the scale represent?”

Because if it were my scale, even just one of those game jam games would outweight Braid a lot. I attended a game jam and met several new people, some which I am very good friends with now, developed a game, and actually learned an entire new approach to game coding that I’ve put into play in all my projects now. The experience of developing one stupid, tiny game that wasn’t really all that good meant much more to me than Braid ever could.

So the subtlety lies in the scale. How close would I be if I said that the scale, as you meant it, represents The Bigger Picture?

That’s the best I can do, because from there on, it becomes a big tangled mess, because The Bigger Picture means so many things to so many people that the subtlety of what you’re saying gets clouded to a point in which I can derive nothing useful from what you’ve said.

Hope to hear back from you!

@hecker – i’m hardly following you around, i read (and write for) indie game blogs regularly. i also recall only one other time in which i said anything regarding you, not 3-4 as you claim (could you link to them?). if anything, you’re the one that’s following the indie game community around, with your constant lectures to it.

and i did address the content of your talk, when i seconded radix’s comment. i was just also addressing why your talks are often so wrong (my guess was it’s because of your lack of experience).

it’s nothing personal against you, though. i had the same problem with phil fish and (before he released braid) jon blow: always giving talks telling indie game developers what to do without actually doing anything themselves (jon blow later actually did something, but at the time that he was giving all those talks he had done nothing). you can at least understand how offputting it is for an outsider to come in suddenly and start basically ordering people around, right? your november ’09 talk on ‘what it is to be indie’ was probably the worst of the lot, this one has problems in that it doesn’t take consideration of differing motivations and amount of free time, but at least is an understandable position that some (but not all) people might benefit from following.

if you guys think i’m exaggerating when i say he’s telling indies what to do, here’s a quote from his blog post:

“‘I do worry about him and a lot of these younger indies, and if I had an orbital mind control laser, I would use it occasionally to make these guys more deeply explore some of the awesome mechanics they discover with their quick prototypes.”

To Paul and Snow:

I think Chris has enough experience.

Over 10 years ago, he pioneered 3D game physics, and people over the world learned from him through the GD Mag. Programmers still refer to his publications.

Those are products that did “explore their mechanic to the depth it deserved”.

This particular rant was not deep enough to convince me, but I know it comes from a person with experience.

By the way, merits aren’t always a good measure of experience.

For example, I feel stupid for finishing 6 freeware games during 5 years, and first now I realized why I made them :) I guess I can say my experience was disconnected from my subject.

I’d just like to add, that my comments were never a personal attack. I didn’t know the guy. IF all someone did – was work on Spore – one single non-indie game, then my opinion is that that wouldn’t qualify that person to tell indies what they should do as in terms of development. If he is qualified as some have said, good for him, and I’m glad he had the opportunity to give a speech, but… I still disagree with him like before. Nothing personal.

I help organize the Toronto Game Jam (build a game from scratch in 3 days!). The 3-day deadline helps motivate people so we need to keep it. A mammoth amount of work gets done thanks to the laser focus 3 days forces.

That being said, we want people to create great games in 3 days, not games that are great because they were made in 3 days.

After the jam, we strongly encourage people to continue working on their game. There are some amazing 3-day ideas that could become great games if pursued. To that end, we hold a “TOJam Arcade” one month after the jam motivating game makers to finish their game for public presentation. Many ideas need more time …

… which is where Chris is totally right.

There is nothing sadder than amazing potential that simply doesn’t get fully explored. Yet I think that among the 200 games he put on the opposite side of “Braid”, one of them might have been “Tower of Goo”. Which was an important evolutionary step to “World of Goo”. Which I love.

The conclusion I draw from this for me is rather: If you have a better idea for how to use the gameplay teased in some random prototype game… don’t be afraid to expand on it! I would go even so far as to say that, if you have a plan for further developing an idea, you should even steal the original idea from whoever just packed it into a short proof-of-concept game and then let it rot in the “finished in 4 hours” section of their website. Don’t throw ideas away once you barely scratched the surface of their potential gameplay. Pick up all the the throw-away games, and expand, polish and reinterpret them!

An OUTSIDER? Paul, really?

Man, let’s not make this an issue where somebody has to prove their credentials before people can decide whether what they’re saying makes sense or not.

Besides, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to have people out there encouraging indie developers to think big… or at least think medium-sized.

shut up paul.

when did i ever “tell indies what to do”?
i gave a talk a year ago about self-promotion, which im obviously awesome at. i dont think i was talking out of my ass there.

” i had the same problem with phil fish and (before he released braid) jon blow: always giving talks telling indie game developers what to do without actually doing anything themselves”

go fuck yourself.

i’ve been doing GAMMA for 4 years now.
i’ve made games for 2 of those.
i’ve been running the indie game rant at IGS for 2 years now.
i won a fucking IGF award.

seriously, go fuck yourself.

fishy you are now telling paul to fuck himself

what evidence do we have that you are experienced at fucking yourself

I mean I am pretty inclusionist when it comes to self-fucking but when you declare yourself a bona fide Self-Fucker and make a point of sharing your self-fuckery wisdoms you do open yourself up to the more the rigid definitions a bit

I did nothing before Braid was released??

That’s news to me.

Actually, I did a lot of things. Some of them were game projects. At least one of them was an “indie game” first released way back in the mid-1990s before “indie games” was even a concept.

The reason most people have never heard of that game, or my more-recent projects, is because they aren’t nearly as good as Braid.

Here’s a page containing some games that I worked on for 1-2 weeks each full-time: http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/

They are not Finished as Chris puts it. Yet they tend to fall into the same range of games that those disagreeing with Chris’s lecture would want to consider finished enough. (They certainly have more work put into them than most game jam games.) Yet Paul never heard of those games, and I am not surprised. They are not as good!

For what it’s worth, I liked Immortal Defense.

ChevyRay, I get where you and Radix are coming from with the differing motivations point, but for me, personally, both as a creator and a consumer, I try stay away from the “intentional fallacy”, as they call it. I think during crits intention is really important, because you’re trying to get feedback on whether your goals are being met by your work, but once the work is done and out there, it doesn’t really matter what you indended or what your motivation was, the work stands alone. Well, that’s my theory, anyway. Everybody’s different, obviously.

As for the “we” in “we don’t need more wacky ideas”, I mean the industry & form. Now, granted, who the hell am I to speak for the whole industry, but hey, it’s a rant, it’s supposed to be a bit of an over the top inspiration/confrontation. The non-rant version would be something like, “on the whole, I think there are lots of interesting and innovative game mechanics which have not been explored very deeply that seem like they’d yield a lot of gameplay that would be interesting to both players and developers, and I think we have a lack of that kind of exploration of depth, so let’s do more of the latter for a while and less of the former”. :)

And no, this isn’t about “reaching out” for me, it’s about pushing the envelope of our form. I guess it’s kind of kooky, but I do believe we owe it to games to do a good job exploring interactivity deeply. I mean, new art forms don’t come along very often, so we need to make the most of it.

paul, I dunno, I probably should have made my saving throw and not said anything. My November 2009 talk wasn’t remotely about “what it is to be indie”, you should read the indiegames summary again.

Chris

checker:
The thing about a lot of these jam-style games, as I mentioned previously, is that they wouldn’t exist otherwise. A lot of devs use mini events like Ludum Dare to essentially just take a break for a weekend from their ‘main’ project, which isn’t affected–besides maybe benefiting from some new perspective. If you wanna talk fallacies I reckon that’s a false dichotomy, braw.

What does braw mean?

Radix: I’m just saying I would accept losing a bunch of jam games for a few more deep games. That’s what the silly scale was all about. By the way, humpnik#38, they were all IGJ games, ToG wasn’t one of them, especially since I think ToG -> WoG is an example of exactly what I’m talking about with Finishing…ToG was a cool and promising idea, and they explored it more and made WoG, a Finished game.

It’s a bit of a false dichotomy, it’s true, but I definitely feel like the focus on dev time is an issue, and jams are one aspect of that, but not the only one. The key thing is there is a lack of deep gameplay exploration and Finishing, and there are probably a lot of reasons for that.

As a side note, I do think jams and compos and whatnot actually do distract people from their “main project” more than you’re saying, but I only have anecotal evidence for that, not any real data.

Chris

Chris, I just want to make an apology, if anything I said was offensive in anyway. Like I said, nothing personal, but sometimes I do tend to react a bit more extreme than is warranted. My opinion simply differs and my comment should have been a bit more appropriate.

I’ll just have to continue to disagree about that, since most people just call a 48-hour break from work a “weekend”.

We also apparently have different opinions on the contribution of scattergun innovation. I feel it’s unnecessary for the originator of an idea to expand on it; if it’s valuable it can be adapted or incorporated by others. I’m not really comfortable with crystal ball advancing-the-medium discussion so I’m not going to press it.

But I’ve noticed something you may not have taken into account: it’s not uncommon for first time jam participants to be coders or artists who have never made a game before. Isn’t it valuable that jam culture provides an appealing entry point for people who might not have otherwise ever attempted game design? How do *people* weigh in against Braid on the false choice see-saw?

I don’t think Paul Eres has ever heard of an ad hominem logical fallacy before.

Or if he has, he sure has mastered using it in his arguments.

@anthony flack – an outsider to the indie games community. you and i posted on the dexterity forums about ten years ago, we’re long-time members of the indie game community, whereas he just joined it. he’s not an outsider to game design, he’s an outsider to indie game design; there’s a difference between the two. experience in mainstream development doesn’t equate to skill in indie development, and vice versa. there’s some overlap, but huge differences too. i wouldn’t pretend to give advice to people making games in the mainstream games industry, for instance.

@fish – i didn’t specifically mean in talks, but also in general stuff like giving design advice. setting up the indie game rant isn’t experience, it’s kind of what i was talking about: it’s setting up a situation where indies (in a sense) tell other indies what to do. it’s that that bothers me. i don’t think it’s a good idea to compose these prescriptive ways of making games, or presenting them in a prescriptive fashion. i prefer when they’re presented in a descriptive fashion, like ‘this is how i make games, maybe this will help you’. not ‘this way of making games is wrong’, which is my impression of your historic approach to people who design differently than you do (i don’t know if it’s still your approach today).

@blow – thanks for liking my game. and i do remember some of those prototypes, but do you really think that those qualified you for all the prescriptive talks you gave? let’s ignore the issue of experience then, let’s say you’re as experienced as will wright. i’d still have a problem with prescriptive game design talks like some of yours and like this one. will wright, notably, doesn’t talk like this, he doesn’t tell people what they should design, what approach they should take. this talk does. and i don’t think it’s helpful. i don’t think it’s helpful to tell people like cactus ‘no, you’re making games wrong, you should learn how to make longer games, it’s not that you can’t, there are ways to do it, just learn’. or to be patronizing toward indie developers by saying that they are lazy and don’t take game mechanics to their logical conclusion when in fact it’s often just that they don’t work full time at it, or are kids and don’t have enough self-discipline and planning skill to finish long-term projects.

@judgespear – neither of those is true, because for it to be true i’d have to be arguing against him. i’m not; i’m not trying to prove him wrong. this isn’t an argument. i’m simply commenting on things, stating thoughts, not composing a logical argument. and those thoughts were that it’d be silly to take advice on finishing big indie games from people without experience in finishing big indie games.

Oh, shit, this reminds me: I have to renew my indie game developer membership card!

Paul: an idea that has merit has merit regardless of who delivers it(or is “qualified”). Like judgespear says, you are committing a logical fallacy every time you bring this up.

And I don’t think the word “rant” adequately describes what Chris is saying. I do believe “critique” does. Because, Chris is not explicitly saying that there is only one absolute way to do things. He is simply analyzing a situation, and then sharing his perspective of the situation with others so that someone might learn something from it. His purpose is constructive, and this is exactly what a critique aims to accomplish.

Critiques are not final, they are not absolute, they are a perspective. Since it is just a perspective, you can either take it in and try to learn something from it, or you can swipe it under the rug because you don’t see the merit; but you -can’t- change it, so stop trying.

Maybe Chris incorrectly assumed that the indie games community could handle a critique.

I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Chris Hecker here. As a concept artist I value interesting ideas and multiple explorations (and iterations) thereof quite high. I often… no, always, value a good concept higher than a polished turd, or even a polished mediocre idea.

I’ve grown to like games which are not very close to the typical local optimums of fun mechanics – i.e. stuff that isn’t easily prototyped. It’s difficult for me finish anything because of my tendency to want things which require a leap of faith or foresight, and certainly a lot of work before it starts getting fun.

When it comes to pleasing me and the minority who share my preferences, neither small or big devs are succeeding. For me, finishing is more about coming up with deep and engaging mechanics than about keeping mechanics simple in order to make the project ‘finishable’ on other levels. I can take a lack of polish if what’s underneath is really interesting.

That said, I believe that there are a massive amount of unexplored fun simple ideas (e.g. Tetris) out there still and right now indie developers are probably in a better position to explore these than big developers (or ‘finishers’) are.

Theoretically, indies are also in a better position now to explore ideas which are further out there in ‘difficult to make art assets for’ territory, because people are OK with indie games not looking very polished. DF comes to mind, as an extreme case.

@the_dude – as i mentioned to judgespear, it can’t be a logical fallacy if i make no claim to logic. i’m not making the claim that my thoughts are logical. i’m just presenting what my thoughts are. that’s entirely different from arguing against a position.

“I dunno, I probably should have made my saving throw and not said anything. My November 2009 talk wasn’t remotely about “what it is to be indie”, you should read the indiegames summary again.”

@Chris: Definitely not, thought it was a very interesting talk, and sparked some rad discussion and questions that I’d not asked before. Thanks for dropping by anyways, I appreciate the answers.

I haven’t seen the talk, but I did read the post and several peripheral discussions – excuse me if I’m missing anything out.

“I use the example of Braid versus a giant pile of the Indie Game Jam games, and I think Braid has more value because it explores its mechanic to the depth the mechanic deserves.”

This is probably the bit that I’ve been thinking about the most. I haven’t played Braid (I find it difficult to appreciate works that have achieved a certain level of ubiquity – though I did play Painter some time ago, and thought it excellent), but, using my imagination, I can’t really imagine myself ever reaching the same conclusions.

So then I wonder “Why do I value these jam games so much?” Firstly, it’s almost certainly not time-fetishism for me. I wonder if it’s more the social context – I just started making games at the tail-end of a rather unpleasant bout of depression, and the vitality of the Indie scene was something I really appreciated.

I also wonder if it’s not a case of back-patting: do I enjoy these other small scale projects because lending them legitimacy backs up my own very precarious sense of legitimacy? Is my appreciation of these games really borne from feelings of sympathy and a desire for consolation?

There is a sense in which finishedness, especially when presented in the manner Mr Hecker has done above, really comes off to me as being just another value, just another thing that somebody wants. Finishedness is just another thing just like difficulty is a thing, and genre is a thing, it’s something that’s requested of us, it’s a reactionary trend – it’s just a fashion to me.

One thing that I am happy to see is that, in addition to this call for a particular type of engagement, there’re also more opportunities now for people looking to do exactly the sort of stuff you’re requesting (normal commercial outlets, the indie fund, more commercial and non-commercial government funding popping up).

In the meanwhile, what am I to do? I am engaged in a rather different direction of action. It’s horrible and unpleasant, it sometimes feels mindless, and it’s severely impinging upon my sanity, and I do not ever expect to experience any personal satisfaction from anything that I do. I feel like I’m painting myself into a very awkward corner and I wonder how much further I am going to take things, and what my reasons for doing so might be. For all that I’m willing to suffer for it, I see what I’ve ended up doing as being pretty reactionary itself to some extent – there’s nothing that feels pre-ordained about anything. Each to their own, I guess.

So, these are things I’ve been thinking around (there are also a number of comments above that I agree with, but they’ve been said so there’s no point in repeating).

Hey Paul, if your opinions are not based in any logic, then what use are your opinions to us logical human beings?

What’s the definition of “finishedness” though? If something feels unfinished, to me that suggests that a necessary part of it is missing. I don’t see how, in this context, “unfinishedness” could be a desireable quality.

“I find it difficult to appreciate works that have achieved a certain level of ubiquity”

You should work on that. That’s snobbery, that is.

Towards the content of the rant itself:

Actually, I think one of the finest counter-arguments against “Focus on your game and Finish” is Andy Schatz.

It’s a great story if you haven’t heard it. He was developing Dinosauria (multiple years of dev time planned) and he decided to take a break and make this little game he always wanted to try out called Monaco.

While it wasn’t a weekend project (i think it was like 6-8 weeks) it was certainly a departure from The Game He Had To Finish. If he hadn’t done that, well, then I would be much sadder because I love playing Monaco.

Of course, it comes full circle when you set your sights on the fact that he _is now_ Finishing Monaco. That’s great and I couldn’t be happier he’s Finishing it.

I guess I’ve always seen jam games and prototypes as a healthy thing in my career as a game developer, and it would seem the same would be true for Andy and Monaco.

One of my favorite quotes from an OG indie no less; Thoreau: “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of feeble minds.”

While I think you’re right, Chris, that more Finished games would be a great thing for the medium. The difficulty of that (for those of us below the poverty line, which I’m guessing is a vast majority) has much more to do with the many impasses we face, than it does the lack of a will to Finish.

“What’s the definition of “finishedness” though? If something feels unfinished, to me that suggests that a necessary part of it is missing. ”
Any particular definition or feeling of finishedness, or any particular definition of anything, when it imposes itself on or intervenes in a creative process, is legitimate to question, examine critically, and ultimately deny. At least I think so.

There’s also a sense in which lack or absence can be features of a work.

>You should work on that. That’s snobbery, that is.

I’m aware that it can be problematic, but I don’t think it qualifies as snobbery. I don’t think less of people for playing Braid, nor do I think less of Mr Blow/Mr Hellman as artists for working on it. I can see that it might negatively affect my artistic integrity, but I can’t play it with a clear mind, and filter out all the things I’ve heard about it. It’s gotten so much love that I don’t really feel any real obligation to – there’re lots of other developers doing things that I feel are very worthwhile whose works I can experience more directly, and who I feel need more support. And I try to.

@greg – i’m not sure i follow your question. are you saying that statements which aren’t logical arguments should never be said? how about such statements as increpare’s statement that he went into indie games after depression, and that it relieves it somewhat. that isn’t a logical argument. he’s just stating something true about himself. and something that’s interesting to other human beings, to boot. similarly, let’s say you tell someone that you love them. you aren’t making a logical argument, you’re just stating a status report or condition within yourself which is relevant to them, and may make them feel good. should people not tell others they love them because it’s not a logical argument, just a statement of internal feelings?

@FISH: “when did i ever “tell indies what to do”? i gave a talk a year ago about self-promotion, which im obviously awesome at.”

Obviously.

“Any particular definition or feeling of finishedness, or any particular definition of anything, when it imposes itself on or intervenes in a creative process, is legitimate to question, examine critically, and ultimately deny. At least I think so.”

Well I’m not saying that you can’t use roughness as a textural quality or anything. Or a deliberate open-endedness. But if “unfinished” as a word means anything at all (and if we can’t agree on the definition of words, then we can’t really communicate) it surely implies “not enough”, so in that sense it’s a judgement of the work. And if the creator believes that something is “unfinished” then that implies that they have given up before reaching a successful resolution.

That’s not to say that there is no value in unfinished work, I mean Picasso considered Les Demoiselles D’Avignon to be unfinished, but it’s still one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century. But I think that every creator who wants to create good work (as opposed to somebody who’s just interested in going through the process), is hoping to arrive at something that satisfies their own sense of “finishedness”, and to give up before you get there is always a failure of sorts.

I got the impression Hecker was talking about finishing in a different sense than “the creator thinks it’s finished” — it was more about creating a ‘deep’ game, one that ‘explores its mechanics to the depths they deserve’

One example that helped me better intuit Hecker’s criteria of depth came from tigradio 11: Farbs says Hecker seemed to think of “Rom Check Fail” as an “unfinished” game, though Farbs considers it finished.

I do think this is a genre issue on some level — actually, it reminds me of a common feature of short story writing. Short stories often feel ‘unfinished’, like they end abruptly and without fair warning, but that unfinishedness can also serve as an open-endedness, as room for your imagination to fill in the possibilities … and by showing you only this one snippet of the story, instead of a ‘complete’ story, they may lead you to some realization which you would have otherwise missed.

So perhaps an alternative goal to ‘finish your game’ could be to refine the art of the ‘unfinished’ game — to elevate the short form of mechanically-interesting games to do things not possible in the long form. I think “rom check fail” may actually be a step in that direction …

Of course, there is also work that’s unfinished to the creator as well; but with that I think it’s usually either abandoned for a reason, or they’re already trying to finish it.

Thanks for your interesting response, Anythony – I hope you don’t think I’m splitting hairs.

*’(and if we can’t agree on the definition of words, then we can’t really communicate)’*

That you know that you can establish that you don’t agree on something presupposes some communication has taken place (though maybe it’s not what you would consider real communication?). Borges (I think – I can’t find a reference off-hand, though) didn’t like dictionaries at all – does that mean he didn’t care for meaning or communication? I agree it can be very frustrating to talk to someone who has very different ideas of what words mean, though : /

*’But I think that every creator who wants to create good work (as opposed to somebody who’s just interested in going through the process), is hoping to arrive at something that satisfies their own sense of “finishedness”, and to give up before you get there is always a failure of sorts.’*

I find your mentioning of process interesting. I had never really though of things in that way before with regards to games – I don’t think I’m focused on process as a thing in and of itself (beyond its practical aspects), but I do think that the process by which a work was created is very frequently present in the experience of the end work. When I encounter an obviously big-budget game, I might think “how many tens, or hundreds of people spent years of their lives working on this?”. That’s obviously not what the game is about, and people with personal experience are going generally to be more sensitive to it than others, but I think in principle it might be something that people can make use of.

A number of arts do without the notion of ‘finishedness’ just fine – one can take improvisation, say. An improvisation does have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but notions of ‘finishedness’ are a little vaguer. Say one was to make a game as one might improvise a piece of music (A lot of this might be said to be present in the time-constrained jam games, but maybe better still the live-coding environments that one sees springing up in some places nowadays) – would working in this style mean that one was foresaking the creation of ‘good work’? I see it as a different process to the one you talk about, but not necessarily any worse nor any less focussed on the work being so-created. Which is more suited to the production of games? I think they’d both be pretty good.

Say someone makes a game, and they deliberately leave out a large section – because they want the people experiencing it to feel the sensation of unfinishedness. Is the game finished? You can say “to the author, yes, to the others, maybe it’s not so clear”. I guess I’d be okay with that. As to whether the work should be regarded as, ultimately, finished, I personally think it’s going to be a more than usually arbitrary labelling either way.

The term finishedness can be applied to a lot of things in a lot of different ways by people. You might say that, on average, there’s some core meaning that’s still present in most uses.

*’But I think that every creator who wants to create good work (as opposed to somebody who’s just interested in going through the process), is hoping to arrive at something that satisfies their own sense of “finishedness”, and to give up before you get there is always a failure of sorts.’*

Sometimes, I try to banish ideas like ‘success’ and ‘failure’ from my mind entirely. Both the words and the ideas. One might say “well then if you manage to successfully foreclose such concepts in making a game then it can be said that you’ve succeeded in your intentions”. That doesn’t sound much more expressive to me (there might, though, be a more logically straight-forward way still of wording it). Though I should probably wonder more strongly to myself what the hell I mean when I say what I said in the first sentence of this paragraph.

I think it’s possible to say that finishedness is more about process than its absence. But maybe the gesture of denying it is, if it is just a gesture, possibly more about procedure.

requoting

*”is hoping to arrive at something that satisfies their own sense of “finishedness”, and to give up before you get there is always a failure of sorts.”*

What if you cultivate a distrust for your own gut values? Criteria like this can loose some of their applicability.

If one has an artist who successively denies what comes to mind to him as constituting finishedness of his work, this maybe does assume some core meaning of finishedness (or unfinishedness), one that they’re really centering the whole work around.

For me, these concerns come from a critical examination of the creative process. Ultimately, I want to make art. I do think there’re artistically interesting things to be gained from formally manipulating the artistic process, but given that it’s not really a rational process, nothing that can be pointed out as a ‘part’ of it can really justify its presence. So. Actually maybe that’s a key difference: I’m not viewing artistic creation as being as rational a process as you and maybe some others are?

I don’t know if I’m responding in a satisfactory manner to what you’re saying. I suspect not.

zaphos:
*So perhaps an alternative goal to ‘finish your game’ could be to refine the art of the ‘unfinished’ game – to elevate the short form of mechanically-interesting games to do things not possible in the long form. I think “rom check fail” may actually be a step in that direction …*

Would such works not count as finished per Hecker’s criteria, though? (Given that Mr Hecker decided such a work had these qualities – any such evaluation will naturally be super-highly subjective).

I don’t think they would count as finished in the sense of ‘exploring the mechanic to the depth it deserves’, in that they might intentionally limit their exploration to a very specific aspect, instead of doing something more exhaustive. Hecker’s notion of depth seems very much tied to being exhaustive.

in that sense i don’t think even braid was finished, because it didn’t really exhaust the possibilities of rewinding time in a puzzle platformer; there is still a lot that could have been done with the mechanics that he didn’t do. i can’t think of very many games that exhausted all or even most of the possibilities of a particular game mechanic or set of them.

that’s one of the other issues i had with this talk, it was elevating one type of game above another type (saying that finished, longer games are better than shorter experimental games). i don’t make short experimental games myself anymore, but i still like to play them, and think they’re just as important as the kind of games i make (the ones that take years to make and have dozens of hours of game time), and i think they’re the core element of the indie game community (even if they don’t get on the tigsource frontpage very often). they’re the bread and butter, whereas the polished stuff is like desert.

to extend that analogy, his position strikes me as a ‘let them eat cake’ thing, so out of touch with how most indie game developers live and work (their problems with productivity and lack of time) that he wonders why people don’t spend thousands of hours baking delightful cakes instead of quickly preparing bread.

re: “*in that sense i don’t think even braid was finished*”

To be clear I don’t mean to say Hecker’s ‘finished’ means ’100% exhaustive exploration of mechanics’ — just that it seems to be tied to that idea of ‘more exhaustive’ exploration of a mechanic. Basically, I was trying to restate or clarify the notion of what Hecker means by ‘Finished’ since he does not seem to mean ‘finished according to the developer’ but instead ‘finished according to some external criteria’ — like your game is not ‘Hecker-finished’ if it is not ‘deep enough to satisfy Chris Hecker’, which is a somewhat surprising notion of ‘finishing’ and perhaps worth talking about more directly.

I actually substantially agree with Paul on this, even though I don’t think he’s expressed himself in the best way.

Creative games development has been supported by hobbyists and part-timers since the 1970s or earlier, and that hasn’t gone away just because the commercial end is now dominated by blockbusters.

Most of these developers don’t have the money or freedom to take a year or two full-time, and run things as a business. Few can afford to hire an artist (as blow did). Few can decide to be poor for three years while they work on their dream game. As for me, I just want to contribute for the love of it, without turning it into my day job.

Add that to the fact that there is no infrastructure to support the lives of people who, like Stephen, want to make art in the medium rather than entertainment or saleable product.

So I think Paul is right to find it annoying that these lectures tend to devalue that bedrock of hobbyists and artists. And Paul is being very even-handed here, given that he himself is involved in developing the kind of full-time, commercial indie game that hecker and blow have championed.

I don’t agree with Paul that Phil and Jon and Chris shouldn’t be lecturing on these topics because they don’t have experience, or because they’re not entitled to be famous. But I do think that all three of them can sometimes come off as though they think everyone should do things their way – that is, in a kind of quasi-commercial way. This is like suggesting that every painter ought to get a big grant from the Canadian government, or a loan from an investment fund, and start a graphic design firm.

I think if anything there’s a tendency for people to spend too much time developing failed ideas in game development. It makes no sense to ‘finish’ your game if you can express the full merit of your idea in a half-finished sketch! But by the time you’ve secured your funding, and assembled your team, and sold your buttons and t-shirts on your website, how the hell can you back out? You can’t, you’ve got to see the damned thing through to its ill-fated release day.

One thing that puzzles me about this whole argument is that people who make these ‘Finished’ games are constantly complaining that it destroyed their souls! Phil recently wrote that Fez has left him as an empty shell of himself. Obviously a lot of this is about financial stress, and presumably Hecker and Blow don’t have to worry about that anymore, but why go forcing that on other people if they don’t want it?

Apart from being bad advice as far as improving the state of the art, it seems to be horrible personal life advice for the vast majority of indie developers.

Snow#47 – no offense taken at all, and it’s always good to read differing opinions!

Radix#48 – I think there is definitely a “mulch” aspect to the small prototypes, however, I think there’s also a bit of a hesitation for people to take somebody else’s innovative mechanic and run with it. It’s not absolute, obviously, but I think it’s a slight friction to the mulch idea. As for the people doing their first game at a jam, that’s great. I’m not saying jams should be banned, hopefully that’s clear at this point.

paul eres#50:
> an outsider to the indie games community.
> you and i posted on the dexterity forums
> about ten years ago, we’re long-time
> members of the indie game community,
> whereas he just joined it.

I can’t believe I’m replying to this, but dude, for the self-appointed guardian of all that is indie, you certainly don’t know very much history. I quit my job at MSFT (where I made WinG, used by a ton of indies, by the way) to go indie and live on savings from 1996 until 2003…I didn’t do a lot of posting on indie game forums back in 1996, mostly because there weren’t any indie game forums in 1996. I worked on 3 games during that time, and didn’t ship any of them sadly, but I did manage to help start the Indie Game Jam, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, make sure indie games were given their due at GDC via my work on the Advisory Board, write a ton of technical articles and release sample code that tons of indies have written to thank me for, ran a shared office in Oakland called the Indie Game Barn with several other indies, blah blah blah. Sheesh.

Greg#59 – I think Monaco is a great, but I don’t think it’s a counter-example to “Please Finish Your Game”. I’m not saying finish your game no matter what game it is and no matter how you feel about it. I’m saying some ideas are worth pursuing deeply, and part of our job is to figure out which ones those are, and I think we err on the side of not doing that more than doing that. Andy is planning to Finish Monaco, which is awesome.

increpare – There is definitely a philosophical aspect to what I’m saying which is completely subjective and personal. I’m not trying to present a rigorous argument. My philosophy is that artistic ideas have a kind of inherent depth to them that we owe it to, I dunno, the cosmos, to explore. All of your points are great, and it’s totally cool to completely disagree even with the frame I’m putting around the argument, not to mention the argument itself. One of the reasons I do these rants is to spark discussions like this!

Zaphos#66 & paul eres#67 – Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply exhaustive, more like “closed” in the mathematical sense. Jon left a bunch of time mechanics on the cutting room floor, and probably didn’t explore a ton more because he didn’t think of them, but he did explore a sort of meaningful set of them that interact in interesting ways and feel Finished. To me, at least, everybody should form their own opinion of course.

Bennett#69:
> Obviously a lot of this is about financial stress,
> and presumably Hecker and Blow don’t have to worry
> about that anymore

Uh, I have huge financial stresses, including a daughter and a mortgage, and no income. My ideas about exploring game mechanics to the depth they deserve are independent of one’s financial situation or level of commitment. Even if you’re a part time game developer working 1 hour a week after your day job, I’m saying explore your ideas more deeply; eg. instead of doing 5 games that each take an hour, try doing 1 game that takes 5 hours, etc. I personally think it’s the right thing from an art form perspective, and it’s not some luxury of the idle rich like Paul suggests insultingly (as per usual, when he’s discussing my opinions…maybe I’ll win him over some day!).

Sorry for the wall of text,
Chris

Chris: if that’s the case, then I think that it’s just poor strategy to be worried to deeply about Finishing a game. If you’re working 1 hour a week after your day job, or if finances are a stress, then to commit to some monolithic project like Aquaria, for example, is to take a colossal risk, financially, personally, and creatively. Hopefully it paid off creatively and financially in Aquaria’s case, but Derek and Alec have both said it was a massive burden personally. And that’s the best case scenario, where you get mainstream press and win the IGF grand prize! For every Braid, Aquaria, and World of Goo, there are ten games that can’t find an audience (like Eufloria) or that get mired in development hell (like Fez).

I don’t find your talk insulting, in any way, but I would give you the exact opposite advice, if you’re not one of the ‘idle rich’. I’d say: don’t commit so soon after leaving EA to completing a giant project. Get some small things out there so you can establish a) cashflow, b) creative momentum and c) a fanbase. Feel your way, rather than taking a massive leap into the dark. Manage your risk exposure.

The problem with your point is that if it takes (say) one month to make a 1-hour game, it will probably take around 5 months to make five 1-hour games. But it *won’t* take 5 months to make one five-hour game. It might take two years. Game development doesn’t scale neatly like you suggest it does, and the last 10% of polish can easily take up 90% of the time.

Your options are to either budget 9 times as much time for your projects, or to just write off the last 10% of polish. And if money, time or energy are in short supply, I think the latter plan can often be the wisest one – since losing 10% of polish usually won’t reduce the quality, audience or impact of the title by anything like 90%.

*”Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply exhaustive, more like “closed” in the mathematical sense. Jon [...] did explore a sort of meaningful set of [mechanics] that interact in interesting ways and feel Finished.”*

Ok … that sounds vague. Still, this seems a rather distinct concept from ‘finishing’ a game — an otherwise un-polished apparently “unfinished” game can still explore the same mechanics … so you don’t necessarily need to worry about that last 10% polish to achieve what you’re calling “Finished,” even if you’d have to do so to achieve what most people call “finished”? These seem like almost orthogonal concepts to me …

I don’t see a particularly strong reason to focus on making games ‘closed in the mathematical sense,’ aside from this being arbitrarily conflated with ‘finishing’ … but perhaps this is also because I don’t have a great understanding of what it even means.

Lots of interesting responses, so little time… I’d just like to take up this one little point here:

“Game development doesn’t scale neatly like you suggest it does, and the last 10% of polish can easily take up 90% of the time.”

I think that’s the crux of it – that last 10% is hard. It can be demoralising and take a real toll on the developer. And it doesn’t really help you to grow your creativity. But that last 10% is VITAL to the quality of the end product, as a user experience. It’s potentially what elevates an “interesting” game to a “fucking masterpiece” to a discerning audience.

By all means, experiment. Rough sketches and half-realised ideas are cool with me. But I have played thousands of pretty okay games, and comparatively few fucking masterpieces – there’s always room for one more.

Bennett – sorry, I didn’t mean 1 hour of play, I mean 1 hour to make it, versus 5 hours to make it. That was for the examples of somebody doing this for fun in their spare time. I agree that time in versus time out is totally nonlinear. I was talking about time in, which is linear…you might only get 2x as deep for the 5x time investment, of course, but then we get back to the philosophy part. :)

Zaphos – yes, it’s vague. I probably shouldn’t have used the term “mathematical” here because that means something different to everybody. At the end of the day, this is a gut instinct thing, not something that can be made precise.

If I accomplished anything with this rant, hopefully it made somebody look at one of their quick prototypes, and think, “hmm, maybe I should explore that one further, I was onto something there”. And yes, finishing and Finishing are related but different, and there are many coupled variables in the mix, including polish, depth, etc.

Chris

Chris: if you were just railing against too many 1-hour games, I guess I would agree with you. Maybe you should have called the rant ‘make sure your game is playable by other people!’

I just want to say one more thing, which is this: I understand that Spore is frequently taken to be a prime example of a game which wasn’t Finished, and didn’t live up to its full potential.

I see it differently. For me, Spore is a prime example of overinvestment. It seemed to me that in Spore there were, early on, incredible systems for creature editing and procedural planets and multiplayer sharing, but nobody had bothered to prototype the rest of the game. But once the editor had already been shown at E3, and everyone had grown excited about the exciting idea, it was too late to cancel it.

Now it’s left to the development team to flesh out the gaps in the design: how should we build a game out of these systems? In game development, it very frequently is the case that an exciting idea doesn’t translate to a compelling reality. These are the games that *shouldn’t* be Finished. In fact, trying to Finish them creates a kind of black hole, which years of work can disappear down for no benefit.

How would an extra five years of development have fixed Spore’s problems? Would it have solved the tension between evolutionary realism and creative player input? Doubtful. Would it have made the process of colonizing thousands of planets less repetitive? I put it to you that the problem with Spore is that the fundamental concept makes for an interesting simulator but a bad game.

I bought Spore for $50 or whatever it was and I have to admit I felt very disappointed. What if the team had spent much less time on it, employed fewer people, and sold it for $20? What if they just made an evolution simulator and left out the rest of the goal-oriented gamey stuff? I’d say I would have been much more satisfied with that product.

@Anthony Flack:

I completely disagree. I enjoy polished games as much as you do, but I have played many games that were clearly masterpieces but where that last 10% was clearly left out. Both commercial and indie. Some examples would be:

- Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle (also perhaps Mirror Stage)
- Pyro II by Michael O’Brien
- Quake
- Vangers
- Narbacular Drop (try to remember when Portal had never been announced)
- Dwarf Fortress

Stephen would never make games like Opera Omnia and Mirror Stage if he was to commit to a level of polish like Cave Story. The risk would be way too high to take those risks. These unpolished games may alienate the broadest possible audience, but so what?

I would counter that if they’re masterpieces, then the last 10% wasn’t left out – it’s not necessarily a measure of detail or flashiness, but of completeness. Opera Omnia probably doesn’t need to be presented like Cave Story to feel complete.

Dwarf Fortress is obviously still a work in progress, so its deficiencies can be forgiven for now – it’s clearly a work of enormous scope, and the last game that anyone would criticise for lack of ambition.

But Narbacular Drop is an interesting choice… a great idea with fugly presentation that was immensely improved (and subsequently hailed as a masterpiece) when it was remade as Portal?

Like I said, try to remember when Portal hadn’t been announced. Narbacular Drop actually communicates its hook very well, despite the fact that nobody would call it Finished.

You’re right though that Dwarf Fortress is a bad example for developers choosing to limit the risk of falling into a black hole.

“I’m not saying jams should be banned, hopefully that’s clear at this point.”

I didn’t imply that you were, nor is that related at all to my question which you evaded.

Radix:

> nor is that related at all to my question which you evaded.

Wow, “evaded”? Seems like an odd word to use…I thought I commented on all your points (the impact of jams on productivity, the mulch aspect, and the entry-point into development)? My wall of text was already so long. What was the question, then?

Chris

Bennett#75 – This is probably not the right place for general Spore critiques, but for me, the core part of that game that deserved more depth, in the sense I’m talking about in this rant, was “editor consequence”, where how you made your creature/vehicle/building in the editor impacts its abilities and behavior in the world. There is something really deep there, that we didn’t find and explore, I think.

Chris

I’m sorry for responding without having read this giant wall of text, but I wanted to address the monaco/dinosauria reference above. My interpretation of chris’ talk was that “finish” doesn’t actually mean “complete”, but rather “explore the design space completely”.

And Chris, why dontcha do something with your life for a change, instead of just sitting up there in your white tower telling me what to do. :)

“Like I said, try to remember when Portal hadn’t been announced. Narbacular Drop actually communicates its hook very well, despite the fact that nobody would call it Finished.”

That’s kind of what I’m getting at though.

Narbacular Drop: great idea, “interesting” result. Interesting enough for Valve to buy it in fact. But nobody would call it “Finished”. Despite its brilliance, there were still areas which were obviously letting it down.

Portal: same great idea, but this time refined to the point where every aspect of it is quite flawlessly realised: people call it a masterpiece and one of the greatest games of the decade.

RE: Monaco/Dinosauria

@Chris: That’s fair, but I guess I’m just taking it further here because for me to take a game to that level and Finish it, it needs to be pretty damned special. I need to LOVE it intimately, borderline obsessive, because if i’m not feeling that way in the first 6 months the last 6 months are going to take 6 years off my life. :(

Knowing which games to Finish and which to leave behind is probably one of the most important judgement calls a developer can make. It’s a HUGE HUGE HUGE decision that can completely fuck everything, and so many of us do it without thinking much of it. I know I’m guilty of it and it nearly ended my career. I think that’s some of the chorus you’re seeing here in this thread and I think it’s definitely worth teasing out from this discussion rather than assume that skill is something easily acquired or even a known sum at all.

@Andy: yea definitely agreed there. That’s probably the most positive take-away from the talk and I think it’s dead on.